Since it was founded in 1994, Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD/Labs) has aimed to provide its customers with desktop and enterprise solutions to efficiently manage the substantial amount of information generated in R&D. The company’s offerings include analytical data management and interpretation software, nomenclature software, and physicochemical property and ADMET prediction tools. ACD/Labs has grown from seven to more than 160 employees worldwide.

The informatics market appears to be shifting toward a linked-data approach, enabling the greater integration of systems and data. ACD/Labs President Daria Thorp told IBO, “Several initiatives, such as the Pistoia Alliance, currently advocate for standardization in openness in the treatment of information, and this will become increasingly important as the level of collaboration within and between organizations of all sizes continues to increase.”

ACD/Labs is taking note of this trend with its Spectrus platform, which is designed to improve scientific productivity and collaboration. Components of the Spectrus platform, which can be integrated with LIMS, ELNs, registry and other software and include an all-in-one processing interface, analytical workbooks and databasing tools, will be introduced throughout 2011 and 2012. Spectrus is built on ACD/Labs’ products for interpreting and managing analytical and chemical data, but improvements allow for the streamlining of multiple workflows and more flexibility and speed in how data is managed, interpreted, stored, linked and received. The unified interface lets users view data from various analytical techniques, such as NMR, LC/MS and IR.

The most significant enhancement, according to Ms. Thorp, is the ability to connect more information types. For example, not only can live analytical data from various sources and vendor formats be linked with chromatographic separation data, but also with the pertinent chemical context, such as chemical structure, reaction or schema. “Expanding chemical context to not only chemical structures, but also other related project information, such as mixture formulations, biotransformation pathways and synthesis reactions, enables the transformation from individual data sets through to the full body of project information and beyond,” she said. Access to chemical context and scientists’ interpretations can allow for the reuse of data to guide future projects. The Spectrus approach to uniting data across data formats, platforms, groups, departments and locations keeps important data together for customers.

ACD/Labs serves customers in a broad range of industries. “Our typical customers are organizations in industries that work with chemical molecules, use analytical chemistry instrumentation or want the capability to protect and leverage the chemical intellectual property generated through their research activities,” Ms. Thorp told IBO.

Ms. Thorp attributed the company’s success to its collaborative relationships, including those with analytical instrument vendors. “These collaborations have enabled us to better understand the evolution and challenges present in chemical research and production in order to develop suitable tools to meet those challenges,” she explained.